Fluss (Stadt Land)

KONTAKTE '19. Biennale für Elektroakustische Musik und Klangkunst

How does the globally connected world produce new spaces of isolation? And how can the gap between isolation and networking be understood as an assignment for audiences and theater makers, using the means of music theater?
Fluss (Stadt Land) is a piece about isolation in the border areas of our society in times of global migration. At the same time, Fluss also seeks out the community potential of theater space - as an allegory and as an immersive experience.
In Fluss (Stadt Land), the third part of the trilogy Stadt Land Fluss, the audience is for one hour in two places at the same time: As a group, it shares a non-representational, empty space, in which it is reflected on itself. Occasionally, and isolated from the group by VR glasses, each visitor is moved to one of the places at stake in the question of belonging to a society offering protection: to the external border of the EU, on the shore of the border river Evros between Greece and Turkey.
The public of Fluss sits on rotatable chairs in the middle of the performance space. They get VR glasses with a 360 ° film, in which they can move individually - by turning to the left and right, up or down. The ambisonic sound of the film is heard on loudspeakers integrated in each of the VR-glasses. At the same time, eight speakers surround the group with an electronic spatial composition developed in collaboration with drummer Robyn Schulkowsky.
The film was shot with a 360 ° camera in a single, 50-minute, seamless shot in the morning light on the banks of the wintry Evros River. Only a few props in the 360 ° panorama landscape are reminiscent of an existing presence: a wooden hut, tarpaulins, a semi-finished border fence and a stray dog. The emptiness of the border river is the condition of our living together in the center; no city, no country without a river. One bank of the river is outside, the other within that partitioning community. In between a vacuum compressed to a few centimeters. Which side we stand on? Who can recognize this in a place where the vegetation has proliferated? The artificial lighting of the landscape gives way to the dawn light in the course of the play. The only home goes up in flames. Fluss (Stadt Land) is an end and a new beginning, a borderline experience.
While each individual is left alone at this external border of our cultural and political domain of definition, the theatrical audience shares the experience, the location of the performance, and the musical level of the piece: the film's realistic soundtrack faces the musical level of electronic music , the theater stage reveals ist presence. The knowledge of the other also connects in the experience of isolation.
Rivers are among those ambivalent institutions that connect people at the same time and show them their limits. As waterways, they have been bringing goods and people for centuries in large quantities from one place to another. If they overflow their banks, idyllic landscapes quickly turn into distressed areas and villages and towns become at least temporarily uninhabitable. Rivers are settled at, but it is easier to walk alongside them than to cross them. A river impedes not only the ways of the wanderer, but also of merchandise and heavy military equipment. Thus, the geographical border is often political as well.
In a very similar way, the theater is an ambivalent institution. Above all, independant theater in Germany has worked in recent decades to set, cross, assert and shift spatial boundaries, from the dissolution of the fourth wall to site-specific performance in urban space. In the concert hall, the ideal of an all-encompassing musical experience still seems to be alive, though the line between stars and fans in front of the stage could hardly be bigger. Under what conditions is theater and concert a communal experience of community and when, how, where are they an isolated experience of isolation?
Fluss (Stadt Land) is the final part of the trilogy Stadt Land Fluss. The three full-length musical theater pieces deal with specific forms of coexistence, in the diversity of urban constellations (city), in manageable networks of rural environment (land) and under the conditions of geographical and socio-economic isolation (river). The theme always determines the interplay of the media in the piece itself. As in the first two parts of the trilogy, Kötter / Seidl in Fluss (Stadt Land) fold the exterior space into the interior and address the stage as a sonic space of the temporary cohabitation of the audience.
Film, Music, Directing: Daniel Kötter/Hannes Seidl | Stage, Set design: Elisa Limberg | Musical Collaboration: Robyn Schulkowsky | Assistance Filmset: Efthymios Angeloudis | production: ehrliche arbeit - freies Kulturbüro
A Kötter/Seidl production coproduced by Festival KONTAKTE '19 der Akademie der Künste and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. Funded by Kulturamt der Stadt Frankfurt am Main and the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa des Landes Berlin. With friendly support of the Studio für Elektroakustische Musik der Akademie der Künste.